Recreate Ancient Foods

Problem: Humans have selectively bred or genetically modified most nutrients out of most foods.

  • This industrialization of food is a leading contributor to many modern health problems.

Solution: Reintroduce the best traits of ancient fruits and vegetables into modern crops.

  • Rewind hundreds of years of food industrialization in a decade or less.
This is not natural evolution! This is the result of thousands of years of human hacking. We need to go back! (Photo: Genome Literacy Project.)

Master Plan:

  1. Reengineer one ancient fruit.
  2. Mass produce it and sell it to the world.
  3. Use that money to industrialize the engineering of 100s of new crops.
  4. While doing above, also keep all patents and research open to the public.

Model: Big Purple Tomato

Academic and industrial research teams are working on enriching tomatoes with antioxidants from berries to make more nutritious, lifespan promoting foods.

The purple tomato was invented by Professor Cathie Martin FRS.

Don’t be afraid of purple tomatoes!

  • Humans have been hacking food and animals since the beginning of agriculture 12,000+ years ago.
    • We’ve actually gone too far and bred too many nutrients out of food.
      • We need to go back! Science can reintroduce key ingredients into food.

We need to promote many of these food enriching projects to bring them to market.

  • Open access to Purple Tomatoes, Golden Rice, and other enriched foods would save millions of lives and improve the quality of life for nearly everyone on Earth.

Recreating Ancient Foods is one of my solutions to The World’s Biggest Problems.

  • This idea is a work-in-progress. If you’d like to riff on it, hit me up @neilthanedar on Twitter.

Published by Neil Thanedar

Neil Thanedar is an entrepreneur, investor, scientist, altruist, and author. He is the founder & GP of Utopic, a pre-seed biotech VC fund investing in the future of science. He is also the founder & chairman of Air to All, a 501(c)3 nonprofit medical device startup, and Labdoor, a consumer watchdog with $7M+ in funding and 20M+ users. He previously co-founded Avomeen Analytical Services, a product development and testing lab acquired for $30M+ in 2016. He has also served as Executive Director of The Detroit Partnership and Senior Advisor to his father Shri Thanedar in his campaigns for Governor, State Representative, and US Congress in Michigan.